The Hindu : Get set to ditch that desktop PC by 2006

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Jan 19, 2004

Business

Business

Get set to ditch that desktop PC by 2006

By Anand Parthasarathy

Bangalore Jan.18. The late media guru Marshall McLuhan's `mantra' for the Information Age — "If it works, it's obsolete" — seems ironically, to make sense today. In a week, when tax cuts have rendered the personal computer finally affordable for many Indians, a global technology analyst warns that the decline of its desktop `avatar' may not be too far away — two years more to be exact.

The Stamford, Connecticut (U.S.)-based Meta Group has just released key findings of a study that predicts that by 2006, the use of desktop PC, particularly in the corporate arena, will shrink to just 45 per cent (link at www.metagroup.com) .

Poised to grab a 40 per cent share of personal computing platforms is the notebook computer and its close cousin, the Tablet PC.

The remaining 15 per cent will be parcelled out among a host of `alternative computing' appliances, including:

* `Thin clients' or stripped down computing platforms, which have no independent administrative functions and execute applications delivered by a central server.

* Personal productivity devices such as pocket PCs, which will increasingly be coupled with communication tools like cellular phones.

At the business end of the market, "Blades" — low cost self-contained PCs sharing a single chassis and power supply — are seen by Meta Group to reinvent themselves for some niche applications like real-time processing or those that require an alternative operating environment like Linux. But by 2006, they will still form only 10 per cent of new PC shapes.

A significant number of users are seen by technology watchers, to demand the ability to wirelessly access their desktops, creating a new type of information worker running from meeting to meeting (often on different continents) while linked to their head offices by the Net's e-mail and instant messaging systems. In the mid 1990s, Rajiv Gandhi's computer-savvy advisers were known as `computer cowboys'. Today a new mobile species seems to be emerging, its members, being called `connected corridor cowboys'.

The Manufacturers Association of Information Technology (MAIT), the main industry body for India's computer hardware industry, had revised its estimates of PCs that would be sold in 2003-04, to 3 million, less than a fortnight ago; but cuts in excise duty on finished PCs, as well as key PC components since then, may drive down prices by 10-15 per cent and take sales by March end, comfortably beyond this projection. The Notebook's share of this could be around one-third.

However, other personal computing products, like hand-helds and tablets, are extremely thin on the ground here, being perceived as pricey, and to that— extent, it may still be somewhat premature to start composing obituaries in India at least, for the PC as we now know it.

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Get set to ditch that desktop PC by 2006